Anthropic is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli AI infrastructure startup Decart for approximately...
The AMW Read
Acquisition of a compute-efficiency startup by a top-tier lab signals a structural shift toward inference optimization and cost management, with $6B price tag clearly exceeding the capital threshold.
Anthropic is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli AI infrastructure startup Decart for approximately $6 billion, according to Bloomberg and Reuters, confirming an earlier Calcalist report. If completed, this would be Anthropic's largest acquisition ever, coming as the Claude developer prepares for a major IPO and races to expand computing capacity and make its models faster and more efficient. Reuters reported that Decart's team could join Anthropic's inference and performance organization. The talks are at an early stage and could collapse, and an Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment. The reports narrow a field of potential buyers that had included Nvidia, Amazon, Nebius, and SpaceX, with Elon Musk saying SpaceX will not acquire Decart.
Why this matters: The acquisition targets a core industry problem — getting more performance from increasingly expensive computing infrastructure. Decart develops AI infrastructure and optimization technology to maximize chip performance, plus models like Lucy (real-time video editing) and Oasis (simulated environments for robotics and autonomous driving). For Anthropic, these capabilities could help absorb growing demand for Claude as it expands compute capacity. The deal highlights a strategic shift: competition is no longer only about building more powerful models, but about the cost and efficiency of running them at scale. This aligns with Anthropic's recent move to hire engineers for custom chips and AI models to make Claude run faster and more efficiently.
One concrete implication: This acquisition would accelerate Anthropic's path to IPO by bolstering its infrastructure story, signaling to investors that it can control costs and efficiency. For builders and investors, it underscores that differentiation increasingly lies in inference optimization and hardware-software co-design. The reported $6 billion price tag is a substantial premium to Decart's $4 billion valuation from a $300 million round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia, just three months ago. Note: Anthropic is tracked in the AI Market Watch index, founded 2021, with total funding of $132.3B (coverage limited to ~5,000 companies), per the AI Market Watch index.
